seocontest2008

seocontest2008 continues to amuse.

We dropped away quickly to about #40 a few days ago, but then the latest batch of the highpower linkjuice we've been arranging came live through our SEO Experiments & Theories page, the SEO Engine Room and raw SEO Power and we're hovering around #21-#24 again tonight on checking.

We now have a a virtual array lining up on the target, and having not wasted any time promoting the post directly, but rather on obtaining the most powerful links possible, and then routing them efficiently through our own site, appears to be working in all the ways we wanted it to.

amusingly seocontest2008 is also 2nd page #17 on Yahoo tonight as well, but nowhere to be seen on MSN Live, we stopped looking at the 9th page.

I expect weve been personally knobbled by Gates probably be because we were rude about Microsoft's free Websites earlier in the year :)

Search Engine Optimisation in Ibiza

So the 2 great Ibiza based web sites we've formed a strategic alliance with are both making good progress. These are both large dynamic sites with a lot of content and some strategy work has been required to get an overview of the situation and challenges.

We are please to say that the worst of this has now been completed and both sites will shortly be taking their rightful places at the top of their searches :)

it looks like Ibiza Now has been granted a Google Pagerank promotion in the update that is currently being rolled out, as has our own site Search Engine Optimisation in Ibiza ..we're both rising to PR3 if the latest datacentre figures are to be believed.

The new Ibiza Voice - Music Clubs and Ibiza Party News

is going from strength to strength, with 13k pages of highly individual content, and now that the navigation has been tuned, sitemaps are being drawn up and the pages carefully focused you can expect to see Voice where they belong, front page for most Music in Ibiza or Clubs in Ibiza searches within the next month or so.

watch this space.

Search Engine Optimisation in London

So the SEO in London is off with a bang. The week has flown by for us and we’ve started work on some great new clients sites, and are waiting for the details to get started on two more.

The week has flown by for us and weve started work on some great new clients sites, and are waiting for the details to get started on two more.

But the latest site we have the pleasure of tuning is The Green Room Events who are a Corporate Events London specialist Party Planners company.

Not just any old party planners London though, one of the partners in this company is only one half of the fabulous Mr & Mrs Smith Boutique Hotels Website.

So you'd have to bet this company is goin to be a massive hit in the pretty near future really, if past is anything to go by. If you want a Party Planner in London to plan your parties you could do far worse than check out the Greenroom. Having made the initial changes were now impatiently awaiting for Google to re-index so we can assess and get started properly.

SEO Client Results 3 DAYS LATER ; )

Ok these types of sites are a joy to work on.

As referenced HERE (scroll to bottom of post) we started work on this site in the late hours of Friday 22.02.2008. The site is beautifully written with really nice content, and has been up a while, and attracted a PR2 rating from one strong but unfocused (anchor test wise) link. Now I know many will say PR's irrelevant etc but it's not, it means the site already has some inherent strength, which when focused properly will give very fast SERP results.

On checking just now @ 14.00 hours Monday 25.02.2008 we got the screenshots below:

#2 for ** Dynamic Yoga ** and a #1 for ** Dynamic Pilates ** :)

..again we know it will likely drop away for a bit but I think we can say that Google doesnt mind the content and this site will be in these searches to stay.

The navigation structure was holding Googlebot back, so all we had to do is let them in and tell them whats there. The content is well and truly strong enough to stand on it's own and the fact the site already has a little PR means it can straight away contend at the top with the big boys. releasing all the extra content is like honey to the bears.. Sweet.. ;)

..wish they were all like this one. ..and the fact that it belongs to a good friend of ours just makes it even nicer.

..check it out Dynamic Yoga Pilates UK

Dynamic Yoga Screenshot

Dynamic Pilates Screenshot

Microsoft's Free Websites.. SEO Ibiza Google #1 :)

Some might say it had to happen eventually, but we think it's still a pretty big achievement for a 14 week old website, or blog to be precise, to outrank Microsoft themselves for one of their own products, so we couldnt help but smile when it just happened live as we watched someone come onto the website on the chat monitoring software, and followed their referral path back to their search. Analytics rocks.

The moment didn't last very long however, when we noticed that this particular Googler was so unskilled in the use of the " key that he had managed to convert a search for free microsoft website from the usual few million results, to, er.... 9. Yep, 9 results. :-/

...Imagine how distraught we'd have been if we'd been last out of the 9!! ..Anyway, the lesson we think is that however much research one does into your site's keywords no-one can ever quite guess at the workings of some of the users minds and finger/keyboard interfacing.

we are not however too upset as in a land of less "- 's we are still #2 out of 143.000,000 pages 143 million lol. :) !!

SEO Fairy Dust

Ok, so we don't mess around. the best part of 20 hours work later the SEO fairy dust is sprinkled on what are in actual fact 2 extremely nice websites, designed by the excellent www.platformdesigns.co.uk and belonging to a good friend of ours, the lovely Jax.

Dynamic Yoga Pilates London and Formentera Yoga, Balearic Retreats in Ibiza and Formentera

dynamicyogapilatesuk.com suffered in the engines from a Flash & javascript design and navigation system rendering it unreadable past the first page which is a real shame as it's a beautiful site aesthetically, and so we're letting the light shine inside finally and all that brand new HTML content can get indexed and start earning it's keep

Both needed attention to Titles, and some minor onpage and navigational work. Both have had HTML sitemaps installed HERE and HERE. and we've installed Analytics & Webmaster Tools (standard procedure) and are now going to just watch for a week or so to see what happens before assessing further work required.


..and start on the next one :)

SEO Engine Room

We would like to announce the opening of our SEO Ibiza Engine Room for public inspection ;) SEO Engine Room. Please keep your hands in your pockets and don't touch anything!!

Have a good weekend everyone.

iPhone Ibiza goes live

Just a quick mention to our good friends at Ibiza Now who can finally get some sleep now, after the launch of their revolutionary new iPhone Ibiza website. The site is optimised especially with the Apple iPhone in mind and allows visitors to look up, contact and book tickets etc for anywhere in Ibiza via their iPhones.

Check it out, it's the future of online directories.

SEO Ibiza - Optimising the White Island

A quick mention about the 2008 seocontest2008 seo contest, we are still not taking part but are still experimenting within the frame of the competition, because with everyone else trying so hard it gives us a good idea of how effective this is against stiff competition, who are trying hard, daily.

We said at the beginning that if we had the time to devote to this, we would rather spend it on pushing our own sites, but have worked out a way to do exactly that, promote our own sites, but have fixed our seocontest2008 testpage in the tractor beam-like linkpower of our mighty SEOIbiza site and are winding up the Voltage down the line.

We are not externally linking to this post anymore, apart from maybe 2 forum sig posts on a particular forum, the remaining staying power of our seocontest2008 post is entirely due to intelligent routing and flowing of linkjuice at it, via our own site.

The new SEO Experiments & Theories page on the site was only uploaded on 13-02-08 and as we speak has climbed slowly since 15-02 when it was first indexed to positions #5 - 9 depending on where you look. It has been happily sitting above PR4 pages, and several PR3 pages, such is the strength of our Google-Fu ; )

Anyway its been a big couple of weeks for us with some great clients coming on board and we're going to have to get our heads down and stop messing about on our own site now and divert all of our time and resources to doing the best job possible for our client base for a while.

Amongst others we're soon going to be waving the magic wand over these lovely Formentera & Ibiza , Yoga based sites.

Ibiza SEO & Flash Web Design Alliance

SEO Ibiza are proud to announce a Technology Alliance with SWid - www.swid.es providing SEO Consultancy on their groundbreaking Flash based Content Management Website Systems.

SWiD are a visionary Flash website design company in Ibiza with the latest CMS technology at their fingertips and the ability to make amazing Flash Sites for their clients, with an online portal system that allows its users to make and host their own Flash website free within the SWid system.

You can assign your own domain name to your site, and add and change content at any time through the CMS system. This tool is called IAvant check it out.

SEO Client Results One Week On.

We started working on www.irrigatio.com last Monday. Look where they are for their primary search term "Irrigation in Ibiza" one week later:



They also show strongly for Gardens Ibiza, Sprinkler Systems Ibiza, Sistemas De Riego and related terms.

PR Flow

The majority view seems to be these days that PR is meaningless and that we should forget about it and just build the best websites we can. ..Yet on the other hand we have Matt Cutts saying that people should be thinking about the way PR is routed through their sites for best results.

We cannot believe that this was a throwaway comment and think that Matt was not trying to tell us something. Now we know that several far more qualified than us, at SEOMOZ amongst others have tried experimenting with this with varying levels of success, however they had very big sites already established, and as ours is only 20 or so pages at the moment we're experimenting with a few ideas we have with it on our site and have also been looking at this with a friend's site.

Pages that have had changes made of this nature are Ibiza Club and Clubbing Newsletter and

Ibiza Voice, Clubs, Music and News The site in question is currently mid 20's for both these terms: Ibiza+clubs & Ibiza+music We are making no other changes for a couple of weeks and it will be interested to see if the pages improve through this method.

And if over the course of the next few months seoibiza becomes really powerful we will know the reasons why. Matt was right, and lets face it, he would know.

Other pages on our own sites that have had a PR re-think recently include:

SEO Experiment SEO Links Tri Camps Fitness Ibiza

If anyone has any questions about our thinking on this we would be glad to discuss them.

Microsoft's Free Websites.. Part 2

A while back we wrote rather cynically about Microsoft Office Live's Free Website Package.

..Somewhat unfairly in some ways it would seem, as following up on our promise to have a look at one, we finally found someone with the interest, and the time and skilled enough to make the best job possible through the Browser based interface.

Our friendly web guru from Ibiza Now who we have been chatting to about informally (as is almost everything in Ibiza) about getting their advanced content indexed, volunteered to have a go at it as the subject came up in conversation, mainly through disbelief that it could really be true I think.

The free domain name is not strictly how it came across it the advertising as you did have to enter credit card details to actually get your own unique domain name but when our collective natural aversion to paying for anything that was supposed to be free, or anything at all if we can actually help it :) ..we settled for the officelive.com subdomain option, which was actually free.

The interface was actually much better than I had expected from the efforts that Microsft showcased with that big fat juicy PR6 linklove, causing all 3 sites to go PR5, with virtually no other inbound links at all.

So I sat and watched as a highly skilled web developer messed around in the ultra simplistic, and dare I say foolproof interface, and got extremely frustrated until we could at least work out how to drop HTML into it to liven their view of the free website world up a bit.



Once we cracked that (and yes it is possible) things looked up a bit. To be fair we should probably get a complete novice to build one now too, as the whole thing took him less than 20 minutes.



We didnt interfere or advise on SEO at all, and are going to just let the site ride for a little while and see where it settles naturally. As an experiment in the viability of SEOing one of these we will come back again and look in a couple of months

You can see the site live here: Ibiza Now Book Shop built on Microsofts Free Website Platform

Frankly we think our demo example is comparable to any of the 3 enjoying the showcase status but are just not sure who to apply to with a showcase site in return for some MS linky love :)

Part 3 of this Post is here: SEO Update on Microsoft's Free Websites ..& It's doing OK :)

State of the Art Website Technology in Ibiza

Ibiza has some great hi-tech websites. If you havent seen the new interactive Ibiza A-Z based on Google maps technology you really should get over there. Maps of Ibiza will never be the same.

And the mighty Ibiza Voice Web 2.0 Music and Clubs site has just been launched with state of the Art Web 2.0 connectivity, music downloads, Ibiza Club news, this site is going to be be huge.

It is a joy to consult SEOing the future of Web technology.

"History will be kind to us, for I intend to write it... " Winston Churchill ;)

SEO and Flash Sites

Heres another lovely Flash site we've just been looking at. www.irrigatio.com

They sell Irrigation Equipment and Sprinkler Systems in Ibiza

or if youre Spanish - Irrigatio Sistemas de Riego en Ibiza would be more appropriate

The site was designed built by the excellent Swid Flash specialists. Check their own site for mastery over modern day Flash websites.

Nice Flash Website for the SEO Treatment

This is a really nice flash site we're going to do some work on. Its a Group Portal for a consortium of businesses under the umbrella of Ibiza Group ...At present it just links out to the individual sites, were going to work some more content in there too

..Seriously, check that water feature, this is one of the nicest flash sites Ive seen. and we've seen a few recently.

Ibiza Group - Investment Group Portal in Ibiza and the Balearic Islands

SEO Results - 3 months down the line..

A while back we wrote about a pushy sales phonecall one of our customers had from an SEO company regarding a costing enquiry we asked them to make. The upshot of it was that the company said that we were rubbish, and that for £5000 Sterling and one year's work they could get my client to Page One.

As this was a big powerful London SEO company with heavyweight (linking) connections the screenshot of them at Page One, #6 for *Property Ibiza* (the term they had enquired about with the other company) gives us a lot of pleasure :)

..One quarter of the time, and less one quarter of the cost, and we're just about to move into phase two with this site and add a load more content, and really nail Page One for a whole host of terms. We know it fluctuates etc, buts its fluctuated from unlisted to Page One in 3 months so cant complain too much

Keyword Research & SERPS Domination

We've stated before the importance of properly brainstorming your keywords and then using that information to properly structure your website. This is an interesting screenshot, a gentleman from India checking out our SEO Beginner Packages. ..Probably trying to figure out how much he should be charging for his new SEO Business pricing structure :)

The packages page has always ranked unexpectedly highly for us, and continues its work here. However, it's addition of the word "beginner" that put us #1 here, the page is only about #15-20 usually depending on where and when you look. Try to build as many variations around your basic terms as possible and then reap the long-tail searches all the way home.

And this one, more SEO SERP Domination in action, here you can see that not only are we #1 (and effective #2 with dropdown) plus #6 (and effective #7 with the dropdown) but positions #4 and #5 are also clients of ours actually showing up in these searches too.

A click of their homepage to see why they're ranking so well brings the customers right on into us as well ;) If you cant dominate the whole Google frontpage due to the anti-spam legislation of not having duplicate sites (position #3 take note ;) ..then get your client to carry your torch for you as well, we say ;)

many people obsess over the main terms when you can scoop up hits from all round the park. If you are in a highly competitive area leave them all chasing the fools gold and pick up all the rest theyre missing. Search Engine Optimisation Ibiza style

SEO Case Study Part 2 & SERP Domination Tactics

The second part of our look at our own SEO Demonstration Website, the SEO in Ibiza website case Study Pt II is now up for all those who have been reading up. - The analytics are quite interesting with this one :)

We are also touching on another strategy we use as much as possible, for maximising exposure and referrals christened SEO & SERP Domination Tactics, which means different things to different people, but for us is just a way of maximising our exposure from the beginning, spreading risk, and ultimately, when done right, shutting your competition out of the top FOUR spots :)

Whilst we cant give away the trade secrets, this may be helpful to some of the Google-challenged out there, and hopefully a different way of approaching things.

SEO Consultancy

Another company we are currently consulting with informally is the long established global branded Ibiza Now Magazine with regards to their website's SEO status.

Together with www.ibizaa-z.com they have developed a state of the art interactive A-Z guide to Ibiza, based on the new Google Maps API technology.

Currently however Google does not read its own new technology very well yet and so we've been looking at ways of opening up the amazing content inside to let the bots feed on it better.

The website is here www.ibiza-now.com and the spiders entrance to all that juicy new original content is here: Ibiza Now Sitemap

the Google maps technology the site is built on is clever stuff, and when combined with the ability to interface with Googles local business listings, they look like becoming a heavyweight player in the *Ibiza* information searches before very long.

Watch this space.

SEO & Blogging for Small Businesses - Part 2

Following on from our post we wrote about small businesses and blogging we wanted to highlight a very promising example of this from one of our clients. We have done some work of La Grande Bouffe on their website and positioning it better in their searches, and as part of this recommended that they start and maintain a company blog.

The Company is run by Mark Watkins, chef to the stars in Ibiza, and has every inch the air of eccentric celebrity chef about him. :) After a somewhat slow start, Mark has taken enthusiastically to the world of blogging with great individualism and made it his own, through a really nice series of Recepix, or comic strip style cooking and recipes, videos, and his "Oddcast" Cooking Courses and the random daily thoughts of your everyday chef to the Stars

You can find it here: La Grande Bouffe Recipix, Food and Entertainment from the Island of Ibiza

If youre a fan of food and Ibiza Style Mediterranean Cooking and Recipes do go check it out, the video in particular is great :)

Obviously it's just beginning but we have high hopes for Mark as finally having a publishing outlet he's really always longed for :)

$700,000 per year on SEO??!!

So, some SEO Consultants are charging $700,000 per year for their time.

Yes, you got that, $700,000 per annum. This does not, as you may think, get you a corporate SEO machine with hundreds of consultants on the case for you, this is ONE Consultant, charging $350 per hour, for 2000 hours per year!!

Wow. that's approximately what, half a million Euros per year? ..and this particular numpty, it turns out is mainly concerned with the keywords meta for his money too :)

Double WOW. I mean I know we're cheap, but this is taking things to extremes.

http://www.invesp.com/blog/business/the-350-seo-expert.html

SEO Design Update -

On 29 January we indexed an initial SEO Design holding page for a client and friend in this blog post SEO Design. This is the company's holding page Ibicenco Building Construction and Project Management Company in Ibiza until the full website is completed.

But 3 days later we're showing 1st page, mostly top 5 across a range of terms. Even our blog post about it outranks some of the competition :)

Now we know this will sink a bit before we push it back up again, but once the new site is up and running we're pre-eetty confident we can take a strong No1 in this area.

We also know that these are not overly competitive terms with mostly un-SEO'd sites and a few amateurs messing about, the point is that it's not nearly as competitive as your businesses will be this summer...

And you don't have to wait until your fancy new small business website is even finished before putting it to work for you, with SEO @ Design by SEO Ibiza

Or, you have a site that isn't performing like it should, and you want it doing so before summer, get in touch now, because not all search areas are as easy as this one.

..even our blog is above a local competitor,
back on Page 2

seocontest2008 experiments in amongst seocontest2008

seocontest2008

This is still not an official entry into the seocontest2008 just a quick note about it.

seocontest2008

To be honest we have too much work on to enter seocontest2008, and if we did have spare time or resources would prefer to put it into our own, or our client's sites' long term development anyway.

However this kind of thing is often interesting to experiment with, so with the limited time available to us we are going to drop just one single post about seocontest2008 here, try a few theories out on it, and then leave it be. No prolonged linkbuilding campaigns etc, a maximum of 3 hours work between now and 01 April when seocontest2008 will end.

I would expect it to drop down into the several hundred as a lot of SEOs will spend a lot of time on seocontest2008 for sure, as they do in every seo contest, in 2008 and every other year.

As we are not actually entering, but rather experimenting as to how far you can push the supposed limits against the fierce seocontest2008 competition within the confines of the SEO contest we do not expect really to get much higher than halfway out of the 300 competitors.

Ok that's it. that much work would have cost about £50, lets see how it does.

SEO Ibiza, over and out.

edit. ..well, not quite.. we saw some strange behaviour from Google last week and can only assume we were either pushing a little too hard with the onpage spam factor in seocontest2008, or Google had glitches. Our seocontest2008 page was steadily rising until it got to #12 and then suddenly got de-indexed for nearly a week. We even started re-assigning a few of the links pointed at it, and then 2 days ago it re-appeared at about #120. ..today, with no work done on it for nearly a week, it's hovering around the #12-#14 mark again.
Odd. seocontest2008, it would seem is not quite over and out ;)

latest edit 20.02.2008

We said that if we had the time available for this we would rather promote our own sites with the effort required, well we think we may have figured out a high tech way to do both. We have added no more links to our post from anywhere external on the internet, but unstead are routing new linkpower into and through our site, at the seocontest2008 post.

This way, when the competition is over, our main site will have gained the most out of the deal, and as we power up the main site more, various areas we also have routed new linkpower to, are also climbing their SERPS. We think it is fairly likely that this works, because we are holding fairly steadily against the rising competition who are obviously all spamming their links everywhere all over the internet in the meantime.

we also have some more hefty linkpower due online shortly which should be good enough to push our seocontest2008 entry up to the 1st page. ..we shall see :)

If we finish well we will explain how we did it and a lot will have to eat their words. We'll leave it at that for the moment

SEO and the Power of Analytics

Using website monitoring software, and we use Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools for the majority of this, is a crucial aspect of honing and refining your business website to first fully penetrate, and then eventually dominate your marketplace,

As well as fast in-depth feedback on how your website is currently performing, analytics can also really help you further structure your products or services to take advantage of developments that you sometimes hadn't even thought of. As an example, here's a screenshot of a search we topped out in yesterday that brought us a visit from Texas.



If we needed (or wanted) the business we could probably expand straight into this niche as a company specialising in SEM PPC management for Microsoft's Free Websites

As we are still showing first page #8 for the term (amazingly as we have barely targeted it) It would be very easy to now build heavily on that with further promotion and be almost the first SEO Company to market with that specialist service. We havent actually looked, but assumed in a previous blog post that MS wouldnt have been so devious as to actually prevent a Microsoft Free Officelive Website owner from using Adwords instead of the new MS version, but as they're giving the sites away free you never know.

Anyway the point of all this is that it was the analytics that first indicated unexpected ranking for the term to us, at which point I gave it a little push to hold it there for a bit. That worked, and now we're also showing for related satellite terms as well.

The fact that it's been so easy to achieve this shows a gap in the global market coverage for this currently, and as this is Microsoft we're talking about here, one would have to assume this is going be big, even if it's not great.

If anybody wants the SEM work involved in installing, configuring and maintaining Adwords in Microsoft's Free Websites let us know and we'll pass on any enquiries we pick up ;)

Not really, as we don't even know whether that is possible or whether MS have prevented that by restricting access to the HTML code inside, to force users to adopt their version.

05-02-2008 following the MS Bid for Yahoo, maybe they're now thinking that with Yahoo's Overture product and their own captive users they could capture enough of the market share to make it viable?

We can see we are probably going to have to go and get one and dig a bit deeper fairly shortly. What does everyone think the chances of them letting you transfer your domain to Godaddy are? :)